Research Project:
PETROSEXUALITY
As with any eruptive beginning like the Big Bang or orgasmic conception, a word came to me in my sleep; ‘petrosexual’. Somehow charged with an intuitive significance; a planetary attraction between fire apes and an ignitable earth. It repositioned certain humans with an inclination to make profit as animals with a lust to light the flame and the planet with all those combustive gases as keen to keep on burning. A cyclical dependency where carbon based lifeforms burn fossil fuels because their dead bodies eventually form them; a sexual urge to reproduce and indulgent immersion in pleasure. Expressed through a fossil capitalism that burns more, more and more – through explosive deregulation and the urge for a steady stock of energy.
Petrosexuality quickly became a linguistic tool which enabled me to rethink extractive manifestations through a language of pleasure, lust and sexual power and thereby engage with fossil fuels from within a theoretical structure where emotions and relations serve as binding forces between industry, geology, nature and society. I started to fantasise about the fossil fuel industry as compulsively obsessed with penetration; I imagined capitalists caught in sensual emergence into deep time segmentation. I experienced some kind of literal excitement over a semantical ‘coincidence’ when any drill or object penetrates a surface.
Linguistically the term consists of two parts and one pun: petro, sexuality and its unavoidable connection to sexual orientation. I view this framework as stumblingly held together by glue, hope and gossip - it was something I dreamt, it was something they said, it was maybe made up all together. But how and why did the term heterosexuality otherwise appear in the same era as the second industrial revolution (the implementation of the steam engine) if not somehow related? Is it a theoretical reach, a joke taken too far or a historical plausibility that the contemporary notion of sexuality is based upon a steady flow of energy supporting its (re)productive inclination?
To form a stable basis for a destabilising type of knowledge production, aiming to shake things up from within and outside of itself, I address the inherent issue of scalability by bridging the global and local through subjectivity and corporeality. By being a body of flesh right next to a body of knowledge I access a performative methodology where I channel a discourse straight through me - allowing any emotion or thought to emerge during the process
The project has so far resulted in a series of exhibitions, sculptures, videos, performances and a comprehensive publication where I freely parasite and utilise academic language and sensitivity.
Publication:
Petrosexuality - an publication
Works:
Petrosexuality - A Lecture
Petrosexuality - A Mindmap
your goal is our goal
Dirty Coal
Oleum Ex Machina
Exhibitions:
Petrosexuality
your hole is our goal
